Who belongs anywhere anymore? Who has roots? I was on my knees in the shallow end of my city’s most popular pool this weekend, cheering my youngest on as she practiced getting comfortable with swimming yet again. My best friend was laughing with me over how it seems that as parents we stress and fuss over how quickly our children learn to swim, only to watch them lose the skill over the cooler months and then have to relearn it summer after summer. The Escape Hatch (by Duckie Louise) is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. She gazed reflectively into the distant bright sky and sighed, “You know, they’re looking for [the career her husband has] in New Zealand right now. What if we moved there?” And a familiar feeling settled over me. That heartache at the thought of potentially losing the physical proximity with a beloved friend which quickly (though reluctantly) gave way to a parade of vignettes which played through my mind. I imagined her gardening with fewer bugs, sending her boys to a school she had in mind out there, and generally thriving in a hundred little ways that she mayn’t be able to where we currently are. Since one can’t actually love another person if one would long to hold them stagnant just for one’s own comfort, I began that critically important heart-work of moving towards acceptance. Just in case. And listen, it is unlikely that she would actually go, but I’m telling you this because it was the catalyst for the train of thought I’m currently on. We live in a country (at least here in America, where I live) and a period of time when human relationships often feel so utterly transient. Even the closest ones. More than once, I have lamented to my husband that sometimes it really seems as though my favorite people are always moving away. Often, it has been us who picked up and left. And it stung every single time. When I was in my early 20’s, I loved moving. I loved exploring. I loved gathering new friendships around me. A pastor who meant the world to me in college smiled warmly at me once and said, “You really have a gift for setting up shop wherever you go. You move all the way in and put down roots whether you may have to yank them up one day or not.” It feels surreal to look back on, because I cannot relate to my past self in this way anymore. I hate moving. I grieve that everyone I love the most is so spread out that now it is physically impossible to be local to all of them at once. I am just so tired of starting over with all new people and the time it takes to even begin to know and be known. Are you tired, too? How are we all doing out there? Are we trying to fill that human need for community with arguing online? Are we all out here folding laundry, cutting up the apples to put next to the grilled cheese sandwiches, toting the kids around, laughing, crying, struggling, and pressing forward every day mostly alone? I have a love/hate relationship with the idea of embracing this byproduct of atomization by viewing it as if our homes were a monastery of sorts. It’s true, and it’s beautiful. So: love. But some of us are mothers out here and we were not made for this much aloneness, okay? I also doubt we were made to live in this bizarre state where the way you see other people in a way that nourishes relationships is mainly via intentional planning. Packing food, getting everyone in the car, rushing to arrive on time. Canceling plans again and again because someone’s toddler is sick, someone had car trouble, someone had a commitment and they accidentally double booked. So many of us are lacking the ever illusive third spaces. The town squares where you may experience the delight of simply bumping into friends spontaneously. We aren’t surrounded by our peers anymore like we were in our youth. We aren’t swimming in time anymore. What do we do, now? How do we keep ourselves from clinging to our loved ones lest the dread of loneliness settle back in? I’ve been mulling this over and over, and I think the answer is that we have to look around at the place we live and decide to love it. We have to accept the people who are there and never presume connections can’t be made. If you’re a Christian, but theologically complicated like me, it means picking a church you can work with even if you feel a little outside of it all when you start. If you want to dance, but your favored form isn’t available locally, it means jumping into whatever is. It means overtly deciding to do the things that scare you and push you outside your comfort zone over and over again. It might mean asking your neighbor if she would ever like to go for a walk. I have been listening to John Delony’s podcast a lot lately, and he keeps encouraging people to “go first” and “make it weird”. Doesn’t that make you want to crawl back into bed and take a nap? Or is that just me? But I think he’s right. I think we have to fight the impulse as we age to settle into the warm bath of complacency. We have to snap out of it and remember that relationships, people, and life are all messy. There’s nothing for that but acceptance. We have to reclaim our open hands and remember that going with God means we always have roots. Because He is the roots. And He is the One Who sets the lonely in families. He’s The One Who said if we seek, we will find. All of this is terribly inconvenient, but it’s hard to be inconvenienced if we figure out how to walk in a deep understanding that neither our time, nor our homes, nor our resources, are ours at all - but are His. So maybe we don’t go ahead and panic every time the landscape of our relationships changes. Mourn the ends of all the chapters, yes. But don’t roll up in a ball and waste away. Look for the next assignment and look at the people around you and then go love them. Send your memes and heart emojis to the ones who have left your local sphere. You can always keep praying for them and cheering them on. And yes, I will probably be hissing and spitting for a while like our family cat when we took him home from the trash can we found him in and gave him a flea bath over how expensive travel is until I figure out how to fund that. I wouldn’t blame you one bit if you’re prone to the same. But, you know, I watched my oldest learn to swim again every summer. Then, finally, he reached an age where the practice served him and officially, really, and truly, he had that skill on lock. He’s got it. Every year now, while the younger ones repeat the timid process of easing into the water, he heads straight for he high dive without batting an eye. I guess it may be similar for many of us. The time comes again and again to build out our roots, and if we never give up, one day we may look up and realize that we got pretty good at it. That our comfort zone is finally wide enough to encompass the social high dive of all that “going first” and “making it weird”. **A little addendum - eventually I will start only doing voiceovers for paid subscriber posts, but not yet. This one was a little scratchy here and there (only a little!), but I’m about to go outta town, so I’m gonna leave it this time. Promise I’ll sort that out in the future! Love to all of you!** The Escape Hatch (by Duckie Louise) is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. 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